Harry Halpin has a plan for the Internet

The anarchist and net thought leader wants to create an alternative to VPNs and the Tor browser against ubiquitous surveillance. To do this, he wants to pay people with special cryptocurrency.

The only thing that is certain is that the Internet is insecure. Two of the most well-known techniques that supposedly protect against surveillance while surfing are vulnerable. Virtual Private Networks (VPNs) can be infiltrated by spies. Users have no choice but to blindly trust the company behind the VPN. 

The Company may collect and share information about who visits which website and when. And the basically well-secured Tor browser is loved by dissidents, hackers – and criminals. However, he too can be infiltrated; at least by secret services with appropriate technical means.

So it doesn't look good for people's privacy. But Harry Halpin says he can solve this problem. And if the entrepreneur, computer scientist and philosopher Harry Halpin tackles a problem, then it becomes fundamental.

The company of the American is called Nym - as in "anonymous" - and relies on a special encryption technology that has left the test operation for a few days. In addition to sophisticated mathematical formulas, Halpin's research paper on the software states that the question is whether the future will bring "bondage or liberation". For "ordinary people from Syria to Europe, choosing their software is about making decisions about life or death."

Thinking the Internet further

Sounds like overly pathetic marketing, but Halpin is not just anyone. Like his buddy Moxie Marlinspike, the founder of the Whatsapp alternative Signal, Halpin belongs to a group of thought leaders who want to further develop the foundations of the Internet. He worked with Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the web, at the Massachusetts Institute for Technology on encryption for browsers. 

He sat in the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), which sets standards for the Internet - and left because commercial ideas of digital copy protection prevailed there. Halpin is not only an expert in cryptography, he also describes himself as a crypto anarchist: "For us, anarchism does not mean chaos, but individual autonomy."

Now the anarchist wants to do business himself. Nym has 30 employees and is based in Neuchâtel, one of the Swiss cantons that attract crypto start-ups. The origins of Nym lie in EU-funded research projects. 

Since Edward Snowden's revelations about NSA surveillance, it has been clear that Europe itself must develop technology for the privacy of its citizens, Halpin says: "We can no longer trust our governments to guarantee our rights in relation to our bodies, our data, our own minds." After all, not even the Chancellor's mobile phone was safe from the NSA.

Nym is not an independent program, the technology is to be integrated into existing services and make chat apps, movie streaming and online payments tap-proof. It brings together two technologies: that of the Tor browser, for which thousands of users provide their computers to redirect users' traffic so often that it is practically incomprehensible to spies; in addition, the Bitcoin idea, according to which computers can use their capacities to generate digital "coins". 

Only that they do not "mine" virtual money at Nym with their computing power, but swirl data traffic beyond recognition. This so-called Mixnet technique "mixes" the data packets that run through the computers of the supporter network: It adds dummy data to real data and changes the order of the packets. This is supposed to confuse spies who intercept the data. "Like shuffling a set of cards," Halpin says.

With this he wants to fix a birth defect of Tor: The onion browser ("Tor" stands for The Onion Router) is named after the many layers of protection around the data. Tor also directs traffic through several nodes to disguise the origin. But if a hacker squad of the caliber of the NSA has taken over enough of these nodes, it can use a kind of "God view" to monitor such a large part of the network that the anonymity of the users is gone.

Support from Germany

Halpin's Mixnet from the German hacker scene is supported. In 2019, he and his team presented their technology at the congress of the Chaos Computer Club in Leipzig. Listeners there were the first to make their computers available for testing. "Today we have almost 5,000 knots, in Germany we have the most," says Halpin.

What do cryptocurrencies have to do with the whole thing? He was fascinated by how virtual coins - called tokens - could serve as an incentive, says Halpin. Anyone who makes their computer available to make data in the Nym system unrecognizable will be rewarded with these tokens. 

Like tokens, they can be converted into the money nym users or companies that integrate Nym into their software pay for the service. Those who operate particularly good nodes will be additionally rewarded. 

In addition, the tokens serve as an "admission ticket" to use the Mixnet. In early February, Nym offered the first 75 million tokens. They left within five days, the company took in $ 30 million, according to its own statements.

Halpin wants to avoid the trap of the idealistic Tor project: The number of users of two million people is relatively constant, the project is dependent on the unpaid work of volunteers. "Altruism only scales up to a certain point," he said in 2019. However, he emphasizes that he does not want to make Tor superfluous and uses it himself on a daily basis.

The crypto hype is now benefiting him, he admits. "If some guy from Korea or Japan says, 'Hey, I'd like to make some money,' he just turns on his machine and runs software that, instead of mining Bitcoin, provides a node for us." 

For this there are then Nym tokens. Halpin says they are not there for speculation like cryptocurrencies. However, those who make their computing power available to make surfing safer for all Nym users should be able to make a living from it. Computers working for Nym also consumed less energy than the notoriously power-hungry cryptocurrencies.

In the fall, Nym raised $13 million, including from venture capital firm Andreesen Horowitz, probably Silicon Valley's best-known backer. They invest massively in crypto projects. Halpin says, "Venture capitalists look at VPNs and see a highly heterogeneous, inefficient market. They want it to work." With this funding round, Nym was valued at $270 million.

A prominent face at Nym

Halpin has also gained a prominent face for Nym in Chelsea Manning. The whistleblower has become a heroine for freedom of information since she passed on internal DOCUMENTS of the US Army to the Wikileaks platform - then via Tor - and had to go to prison for it. Now she is testing the safety of the Nym technology for Halpin.

Halpin, who in one sentence bridges Heidegger's understanding of technology to Google's user interfaces, has a vision that goes far beyond a start-up. The doctor of philosophy worked together with the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, who died in 2020, who thought a lot about how to free the new media from the grip of commerce. 

Stiegler did not want to condemn them as an enemy of technology, but to use them for the people. The - positively meant - "concern" for others was the focus of his work. For Halpin, protecting digital communications is putting this concern for people and the planet into practice. A book that he had worked on with Stiegler, he also had in the drawer. "I have to get that out at some point."

But if you want to protect the Internet from the NSA, you have little time.